Diabolical Clay

Yesterday I was standing in line waiting to buy some crayfish. I was talking to the woman in front of me and we were both watching one of the workers cook a crate of crayfish, that he then snap chilled and brought over to the counter to be bought by hungry locals. The woman and I were casually chatting about crayfish and favourite recipes, when I mentioned that I was buying live crays and that my husband was going to cook them himself. The woman looked me straight in the eye and icily said I hope they bite you!

She then proceeded to buy six good sized cooked crays and walked out the door.

It wasn’t until I arrived home and replayed the conversation in my head that the hypocrisy of the woman’s statement struck me. She was more than happy to buy cooked crayfish but was horrified by the fact that I was buying live crayfish. Her six crayfish had presumably been alive themselves only an hour previously. I wonder if when she ate them, they bit her?

Late yesterday afternoon I received a phone call from my daughter Veronica telling me  that one of her ducks probably had a prolapsed cloaca. The duck was obviously distressed and was bleeding  from her cloaca. In the course of our conversation we talked about the pain the duck must be in as well as the problems of the blood attracting predators overnight as well as the risk of the duck getting fly strike.

Veronica quickly killed the duck, dressed it out and then wrote about it on her blog.

We have become so divorced from the realities of where our food actually comes from in this western society of ours that sometimes I despair for our future. We are spoiled for choice and we shop in large supermarkets with the most disturbing thing being the incessant Christmas muzak. Children think that milk and eggs come from the fridge and we are never ever bothered by the thought that all those rows of plastic wrapped meat and all those bins full of frozen poultry were raised and then killed by someone somewhere.

As I am eating my Christmas dinner this year I will know exactly where the meat I am eating has come from and who has killed it for me because I will be eating roast duck at Veronica’s.

The past few weeks have been incredibly hectic here at the frogpondsrock household. The Spouse spent 5 days in hospital with blood poisoning, Veronica had a birthday, Amy has been eating gluten, Isaac has been having meltdowns, David has been acting like a 16 year old, I have been crabby, the dog vomited on my bed, some cows wandered through the property nomming on my fruit trees, the cat vomited behind the woodheater,twice, two hens are broody on well hidden secret nests full of infertile eggs, I miss my Mum dreadfully and to top it all off, I have put on more weight.

In between all the mad dashing about like a headless chicken, I have managed to grab a few minutes to catch my breath and do a few things for myself. I submitted these images as part of my application for the inaugural Vitrify Alcorso Ceramic Award 2011.

I also have entered these three dragon eggs in the Cast Members Exhibition, which opens next Friday,  6pm at the CAST Gallery 27  Tasma street North Hobart.

I have been trying to photograph the European Gold Finches that have been eating the zillions of aphids in the honeysuckle, without scaring them away and that has been a bit tricky, as these little birds are super shy and fly off at the first sign of movement.

The other evening The Spouse took me outside to show me something in the front yard.

We had cows in the front yard, two of them with calves at foot had just wandered in off the road.

I didn’t mind at first as I have plenty of grass at the moment and the more they ate the less The Spouse has to mow. It didn’t take long before the cows decided that the new growth on my fruit trees was more to their liking and David spent the next two hours in the drizzle chasing the rotten things away from my fruit trees while we tried to find their owners.

Harry the dog wasn’t impressed at being locked inside as the arrival of a small herd of cows reminded him that his father was a blue heeler and all he wanted to do was bite the cows on the nose and then nip round the back and have a go at their heels.Eventually we tracked down their very grateful owners who came up and took their cows home again.

Now that the weather is warming up a bit I like to have the doors open but there is one downside to an open front door. The downside being this very old chicken likes to come inside and sit up on the couch. I was trying to take a photo of her on the couch when The Spouse came inside and growled at me for taking photos when I should have been shooing chickens off the furniture and scared her away, here she is very casually making her way back out the front door.

I bought some more happy socks when I was in Melbourne. I started to wear happy, stripey socks when Mum was first diagnosed with Lung cancer. On the days when I don’t want to get out of bed I put on my happy socks and smile to myself as I think of my Mum saying pull your socks up girl.

And a couple more photos for luck.

It is time to give a shout out to a member of the Australian blogging community.

Again I have chosen a blog that is sometimes difficult to read, next month I will direct you towards something a bit lighter.

Australia is a very racist country and anyone that says it isn’t, needs to come down from their ivory tower and have a stint in the real world.

I grew up in a rough and ready working class suburb full of immigrants. My father was casually racist and his language was the language of his peers. I was taught to be wary of wogs, wops, krauts and coons. As kids we were disdainful of those that were different, we were taught British history in school and were confident of our superiority.

Of course when I grew up I moved out of my small suburb and ventured into the wider world. I shed my racist skin and discovered that people were just people.

The media and the political spin doctors would have you believe that Australia has also shed her racist skin, that we are a tolerant country dedicated to the ideal of a fair go and mateship. That she truly will be right and that it is all apples mate. Scratch the surface of working class Australia and you will find men like my father, all too ready to believe that all Arabs are terrorists, that boat people are queue jumpers intent upon stealing their jobs and that the only good Abo is a dead Abo.

Mark “Backchos” Mullins is a human rights advocate and member of the Stolen generation and using his blog Blak and Black, Mark will tell you a story of a different Australia. He writes of an Australia that we try to pretend isn’t real and some people will find it easier to attack Mark and attempt to discredit him rather than hold a mirror to their own faces and see the racist reflected there.

The three posts that I recommend you start your reading with are

A day in the life of an Aborigine,

The subtleties of genocide

Men are respectable only as they respect

I have a large honeysuckle that grows over the balcony rail, it is only a few feet away from my computer space and in the spring and summertime the perfume is divine. I often try to photograph the honey eaters as they drink the nectar from the flowers or the silver eyes and wrens as they pick insects from the leaves.

This year the plant is absolutely covered with grey aphids there are  zillions of the fat little fuckers happily sucking the life out of the flower buds.

As soon as “The Spouse” sees aphids he gets an itchy trigger finger and wants to start madly spraying soapy water everywhere to kill the little sap suckers.

I am not that hasty. I like to adopt a wait and see approach to pest management. We have a very good ecological balance here and I have found that it only takes a week or so before all the predatory insects find the veritable feast on the honeysuckle.

Also while the Aphids are sucking the life out of the honeysuckle flowers I know where they are, the honeysuckle is a tough plant and it will recover. I would much rather have a large population of Aphids on one plant that can cope instead of all over the garden on my more fragile plants.

So yesterday when I should have been working on various projects and answering your emails, I was photographing the busy ecosystem that is contained within one plant in my garden.

The birds come in the early morning to breakfast on the aphids.

There are ladybirds everywhere, gorging themselves on fat juicy aphids. (photo credit: Veronica took this first shot)

I counted at least four different types of parasitic wasp busily hunting aphids.They were far too flitty and zoomy for me to photograph well.

There were lots of different flies feeding on the honeydew the aphids produce as well as two different types of small ant.

As I am writing this I can see a number of finches eating aphids as well, I know that if I move they will fly away and I don’t want to disturb their breakfast.  You will just have to imagine them flitting from branch to branch busily pecking aphids off the flower buds.

Is that I can buy pretty,spinny, twirly things that make me smile.

This post was inspired by a young man with a burgeoning  interest in frogs. I thought I would publish some photos here of the simple frog ponds I have at home.

When my children were small I was the go to “frog lady” of my local area. I would supply a batch of tadpoles to the local primary school so that the children could watch the tadpoles turn into frogs in a living science project.

I live in the Southern Midlands of Tasmania, in an area of dry sclerophyll forest. There are places near me that have evocative names, reminiscent of wetter times. Tiny hamlets called Lower Marshes, Broadmarsh and Green Ponds, but with 200 years of European settlement and a piecemeal approach to land management, the marshes and the green ponds have all been drained and replaced by gorse covered hills and dusty paddocks.

This next photo is of a part of my garden. I was in the process of turning the blue clam shell into a new frog pond, when life intervened. I am so busy as well as very easily distracted, that before I had finished properly positioning the clam shell the rain had filled it up with water and the frogs had filled it with spawn.

This next photo was taken this winter, the large wooden box was a fish tank until it sprung a leak. The spouse fixed the leaks with some silicon and it worked really well as a frog pond for a couple of years. When it finally gave up the ghost and sprung multiple leaks, I  put an old eski inside it as well as the plastic orange container thingy. The frogs still use it.

This is a photo of it this morning. It is surrounded by a lovely tangle of raspberry canes, a self sown apricot tree and assorted weeds.

If you look very carefully at this next photo you can see the container of water. This is one of those large black 40 litre buckets with the rope handles that you can buy at any hardware store for about $10. I put it down in the garden and forgot about it. It filled itself up with rainwater, the raspberry canes and grass hid it from sight and the frogs moved in. It is absolutely chockers with tadpoles.

Now for some photos of my more elaborate frog ponds. This next one is an old bath that the spouse rocked into place for me. The dead sticks in the bath were just put there for the lizards to use as a ladder when they fall into the water. An echidna has also fallen in to this bath, just under the water is a large branch and a large ceramic pot which helped the echidna to climb out of the bath. Bull rushes are just poking through the surface as well.

This next photo shows my first frog pond, which is in the middle of a rather grassy garden. I try and leave the grass long so that the frogs have somewhere to hide when they first emerge from the water but it is a bit of a balancing act because it also gives the snakes somewhere to hide as well.

This is another shot of the clam shell frog pond. I have just removed some old shrubs that had shaded the pond and replanted with some grevillias and leucodendrons. The grass is winning at the moment and I should be doing something about it as opposed to just photographing the tangle.

Can you see that reddish coloured weed on the surface of the pond. That is duck weed and it is a great big pain. It reproduces by dividing itself and will quickly cover the surface of a pond or farm dam. I have a love hate relationship with the rotten stuff. I love how it gives the tadpoles protection from hunting birds as well as a surface for newly emerged froglets to hop onto while they take their first breaths of air. I hate how aggressive it is and how it will very quickly smother the pond to the exclusion of all else. I saw some of it in the water plant section of a large hardware chain the other day and I would strongly advise against buying it.

Here is a close up of  it. I don’t know its proper name I just call it duck weed. If you are going to buy water plants for your pond I would sit them in a bucket of water inside before I put them into the pond just in case some of this stuff has hidden inside the pot.

What I am trying to say is that a backyard frog pond doesn’t have to cost the earth or be an elaborate set up with pumps and filter systems it can be as simple as an old eski in a wooden box. All the clam shell ponds have rocks and gravel covering their base as well as rocks placed on one side of the pond up to the rim, so that if any frogs that cant climb hop into the water they can hop back out. The rocks also provide the lizards with a handy spot to wait for emerging frogs to hop up for lunch.

All the frogs photographed here are Brown Tree Frogs (Litoria ewingii).These are climbing frogs with large climbing discs on their fingers and webbed toes so the plastic sides of the clam shell ponds don’t bother them at all. Tasmania also has burrowing frogs who have claws for digging on their fingers and toes and they would become trapped in a plastic pond, as they wouldn’t be able to climb out.

There are some more frog photos as well as some links to more frog information here

Four days in Melbourne is only just enough time to give you a tiny taste of all that wonderful city has to offer. It was a whirlwind visit and I managed to get blisters on the balls of my feet from all the unaccustomed walking on hard city footpaths.

On the Friday afternoon we walked from our motel in North Melbourne into the city via the Vic markets. A quick tour on the city circle tram helped me to get my bearings and I happily absorbed the sights and sounds of a large city, late on a Friday afternoon. We wandered through the busy lane ways which were covered in street art and I narrowly avoided being shat on by a city pigeon as I was photographing the skyline from within a lane way. We jumped on a tram and headed out to Lygon street to finish off our day with ice cream.

On the Saturday we went for Yum Cha in Chinatown and that was a thoroughly wonderful experience. Thanks to Hazel for her recommendation. The trolleys of  food came out at a cracking pace and we happily sampled everything, though in hindsight the gelatinous pigs trotters were a bit of a mistake. Full of delicious food we waddled off to spend the rest of the afternoon at the Vic Markets. Once the market had closed down for the day we tiredly made our way back to the motel where the kids would have happily stayed but I had plans and they didn’t involve spending much time in our rooms. So I dragged them back into the city and photographed David’s reflection as he caught his breath.

After much dithering and debating I pulled rank and we jumped on a tram and headed off to St Kilda. The teenagers faces lit up when they saw this and all of a sudden the atmosphere changed and they spent the rest of the evening being spun and twirled and catapulted on various rides, with the big dipper getting the most attention.

Sunday saw the teenagers head off to the zoo while I met a friend for lunch in Brunswick street. We all headed back to St Kilda for cake in Acland street and hamburgers at Greasy Joe’s.

Finally on Monday we made it to the National Gallery of Victoria, yay. I had been trying to get to the NGV all weekend but we kept on running out of  time.

As the kids were lying on the floor under the stained glass ceiling, I received a call from The Spouse telling me that he thought he needed to see a doctor. Alarm bells started to ring as The Spouse never willingly goes to the doctor. As I listened to my husband’s rambling and confused description of his infected hand I knew the situation was urgent. I immediately began to organise his admission into hospital by remote control whilst trying to admire a Picasso. The spouse was suffering from blood poisoning and I was hundreds of miles away ack.

Due to his Ehlers Danlos Syndrome, The Spouse’s immune system is a bit wonky and when he gets sick, he gets VERY sick, VERY quickly. My son in law drove The Spouse into hospital and Veronica rang ahead  to appraise the triage nurse of all the details of his Ehlers Danlos and The Spouse was in a ward hooked up to intravenous antibiotics within a few hours.

So I arrived home from Melbourne, late on Monday to The Spouse in hospital and Veronica’s blog under siege from a pair of anonymous multinamed nutters.

This pair of repetitive bores are giving me a headache and my inbox is full to overflowing with their crap aimed at my daughter. Their totally nutty rants aren’t just contained to Veronica’s blog though, so please don’t comment here if you don’t want them over at your blog tromping all through your comment sections as well.

I am tired and a bit cranky as last night there was also a brief but fierce thunderstorm which flooded David’s bedroom, the front verandah and the laundry area outside where I store all my clay and glaze materials.

I have a zillion photos that I will process and publish as soon as I can catch my breath.

I will finish up with a little reminder to Veronica’s nutty commenters, before you comment here with more of your silliness you would do well to read my comment policy.

Here you go my lovelies, some photos from our first day in Melbourne. This is just a tiny part of what I saw yesterday.